I originally had experimented with Glogster quite a bit, but found it ultimately frustrating to use as a tool for potential education: until I realized I was using it thinking in terms of how I could assign it to students, rather than what I could do with it as a student.
Rather than trying to shoehorn Glogster into doing something I wanted to do in terms of creating media, I sat down and thought about how to use the tools it provided me with. I noticed the use of "speech bubbles", and it hit me: I've always been a huge fan of comics and cartoons, from early childhood readings of the Sunday newspaper color comics, to recent obsessions with online independently published webcomics. I've even attempted to come up with my own, and the use of the same visual language as comics-- speech balloons or bubbles to show dialogue --made Glogster seem like an ideal place to discuss my ideas.
Glogster is loud, visually speaking, and its format means text communication needs to be brought down to scale, especially when images and art take center stage. Brevity is the rule by necessity, not unlike my beloved Twitter; however, Glogs are also much more readily edited than many other forms of blogging or online visual media. I can tweak the text, positioning, sizing, or even rotation of elements of a glog in mere moments and any time after posting, rather than having to jump into the coding or work with an external image editor. The drawbacks mostly relate to hardware: my tiny netbook's screen is ill-suited to the size of the average Glog, and its processing power means that the site demands a lot of resources I may not have available. However, this shouldn't stop others from using it, particularly as my computer setup is far from typical (or even up-to-date). Glogster's format looks ideal for tablet computers like iPads, especially: I wonder if the creators of the site had just that in mind...
This glog is the result of revising my approach.
Rather than trying to shoehorn Glogster into doing something I wanted to do in terms of creating media, I sat down and thought about how to use the tools it provided me with. I noticed the use of "speech bubbles", and it hit me: I've always been a huge fan of comics and cartoons, from early childhood readings of the Sunday newspaper color comics, to recent obsessions with online independently published webcomics. I've even attempted to come up with my own, and the use of the same visual language as comics-- speech balloons or bubbles to show dialogue --made Glogster seem like an ideal place to discuss my ideas.
Glogster is loud, visually speaking, and its format means text communication needs to be brought down to scale, especially when images and art take center stage. Brevity is the rule by necessity, not unlike my beloved Twitter; however, Glogs are also much more readily edited than many other forms of blogging or online visual media. I can tweak the text, positioning, sizing, or even rotation of elements of a glog in mere moments and any time after posting, rather than having to jump into the coding or work with an external image editor. The drawbacks mostly relate to hardware: my tiny netbook's screen is ill-suited to the size of the average Glog, and its processing power means that the site demands a lot of resources I may not have available. However, this shouldn't stop others from using it, particularly as my computer setup is far from typical (or even up-to-date). Glogster's format looks ideal for tablet computers like iPads, especially: I wonder if the creators of the site had just that in mind...